PAUL GUMMER:
DRAWING THE VIEWER IN
Photography is ‘like a good novel, it’s like a
piece of music, it’s like a movie, a painting – it’s an
expression of your imagination,’ – and shouldn’t have to
be a strict rendering of reality, argues Paul Gummer.

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FOR PAUL GUMMER, GREAT PHOTOGRAPHY
IS ALL ABOUT THE EXPRESSION OF FEELING.
By Don Norris

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11

Inspiration

Tui, New Zealand

‘I’m actually in the darkroom,’ Paul Gummer
chuckled down the phone line. ‘It’s the only room
that doesn’t get used these days.’ The disused
darkroom in question is on the campus of Paul’s
employer, UCOL (the Universal College of Learning), in
Palmerston North on New Zealand’s North Island.
UCOL was founded in 1902 as a technical institute.
It now has three campuses and provides a wide
range of diploma and degree courses to international
and local students. Paul’s department, which has a
photographic imaging program, offers highly regarded
courses to aspiring photographers and designers.
While the primary focus of UCOL’s photography
program is on establishing the sound technical and
business skills modern photographers must have to
succeed, the artistic and creative dimensions of their
practice are also nurtured.
‘In my teaching, I use the analogy of journalism and
poetry,’ Paul explained. ‘Journalism is very factual. It
takes you there, you get the information and it’s all
great. But usually once you’ve read it, you don’t really
want to read the story a second time - and certainly
not a fourth or ﬁfth time. But poetry you can read a
hundred times and you never quite understand it fully
and every time you see something different. There’s
an enduring quality about it.’
That may not sound like the sort of sentiment you’d
necessarily expect to hear in the cut-and-dried world
of technical education, but then Paul Gummer isn’t
your typical technical education senior lecturer either.
Prior to joining UCOL, Paul worked as a freelance

12

Glastonbury Abbey, England

photographer in the UK where he specialised in
architectural work. A fellow of the New Zealand
Institute of Professional Photographers and a
Master of the Australian Institute of Professional
Photographers, Paul was named the NZIPP Creative
Photographer of the Year in 2008, then the NZIPP
Landscape Photographer of the Year in 2009 along
with the New Zealand Professional Photographer of
the Year. Giving the local competition a rest, in 2010
he crossed the ditch to win the AIPP’s Australian
Landscape Photographer of the Year award.
Although he was born and grew up in England,
Paul’s mother is Australian and it was here that he
undertook his formal photographic training during the
1980s. He attended the Photography Studies College
in Melbourne, a private college run by practicing
professional photographers.
‘They just got to the heart of the matter and talked
about pictures and good ways to make them,’ Paul
said. ‘They exposed us to lots of great photographers
- mostly Americans actually. I once asked my tutor
why they didn’t show any English photographers. He
just looked at me and said, “Paul, there aren’t many”.
In his view you got to Bill Brandt in the ‘30s and then
it kind of dried up until the ‘70s.
‘So I discovered people like Wright Morris, Walker
Evans and landscape photographers like Eliot Porter
and the obvious ones like Edward Weston and Ansel
Adams.’
Like most photography students, he started out
with a 35mm camera and a few lenses but, ‘during my

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ﬁrst year, one of my tutors noticed I liked landscape
and asked if I’d ever thought of buying a ﬁeld camera.
I said, “what’s that?” having never heard of them. In
the end I got a 5x4 wood and brass camera. Pretty
soon after that, all my camera gear was stolen,
The police got the 5x4 back because you can’t sell
wooden view cameras for drugs money in a pub,
apparently.’
‘I couldn’t afford another 35mm kit, so I did
everything on 5x4. From there I started to develop an
approach to shooting landscapes. And then someone
asked if I’d ever thought of doing architecture for
a living.’ While he hadn’t considered architecture
before then, he was happy to try his hand and he
began taking pictures at the famous artists’ colony of
Montsalvat.
Inspired by the work of the great English
photographer of cathedrals, Frederick Evans, Paul
soon became a regular visitor to Montsalvat with
his 5x4. So frequently did he appear, that eventually
‘the people there said “would you like a key and let
yourself in?”.’
Frederick Evans, said Paul, ‘described himself as a
photographer of shadows and I saw myself the same
way.’ To achieve the extremely long scale look of
Evans’ platinum prints, Paul soon found himself having
to learn the art of the very long exposure (10-20
minutes, typically) and its companion discipline, pull
development in highly diluted developer.
Although it’s been years since he worked in the
darkroom, Paul’s style still retains a strong connection

Inspiration

Courgettes

with analog photographic techniques. Burning and
dodging in the darkroom has been replaced with
layers and curves in Photoshop, but the intention
remains the same.
‘It’s about trying to express some sort of feeling in
the picture - as opposed to just recording the subject,’
he said. ‘I think that’s what the darkroom could do
for me; pull me away from record shots and into
something emotive. But I didn’t realise I was doing it
for years - I just did it. In two words, it’s about intuition
on the part of the photographer and about conveying
feeling.’
With his landscape photographs, Paul said, ‘‘I’m
trying to take people on a journey to another place.
I want them to see something they recognise - yet
to feel transported to another world, in a sense. It
looks recognisable, but somehow it’s not. I think that’s
where long exposures and water came in. I’ve always
had an attraction to water,’ he explained, ‘and to the
whole thing of long exposures making it look dreamy
and misty and other-worldly and yet at the same
time retaining a sense of accessibility so that it’s not
surreal.’
‘I look for good light,’ he added. ‘I look at the
long-range weather forecast and if I’ve got a day or
two off, I’ll book the time when I think the weather’s
interesting. Otherwise I photograph when it’s ﬂat light
because I can do things with it. If I’ve got a ﬂat image,
I can do a lot with that. I can add all sorts of things,
burn, dodge and so on and tweak colour. But strong
sunshine just kills it for me.

“Frederick Evans described
himself as a photographer
of shadows and I saw myself
the same way.”

Hill Village, Italy

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tips: organising

organising tips:

Managing images
as you travel
HOW TO KEEP YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS SAFE AND ORGANISED
WHILE YOU’RE ON THE MOVE.
By Margaret Brown
ravelling with a laptop is
commonplace, although these
T
days many laptops are being replaced
by more portable ‘tablet’ devices.
Unfortunately, while they provide an
attractive platform for viewing your
photos as you travel, most tablets are
designed for consuming media, rather
than creating or managing it.
Many smart-phones have higher-resolution cameras
than most tablets and provide a wider range of
adjustments. They can also be easier to use. However,
both types of devices, while ﬁne for grabbing quick
snapshots, are difﬁcult to use for creative photography
because their control suites are so limited. They are also
JPEG-only, with all the compromises inherent in that ﬁle
format (see below).
Being able to email shots you’ve taken with the built-in
camera in your mobile device while you’re on the move
is extremely convenient. But, if you’re at all serious
about your photography and want to come home with
memorable images of your trip, you really need to take a
dedicated camera.
This raises the issue of how to manage your highresolution images as you travel and ensure the shots you
take are stored and backed-up safely when you need to
free up space to capture more. It’s not as simple as it
may seem.

Tablet computers provide attractive viewing platforms for images and videos and
can make it easy to share ﬁles, but their storage capacities are limited. Adding a
USB thumb drive, as shown here, can extend storage for some tablets.

CAPTURE TO STORAGE
Backing-up image ﬁles is essential as you travel. When
you review the day’s shots each night, you need an
efﬁcient way to transfer image ﬁles from a camera to
a safe storage system plus sufﬁcient storage space to
accommodate the ﬁles you want to keep.

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tips: organising

Storage requirements vary with different
types of photographers. Casual snapshooters
who seldom shoot video clips could probably
get by with around 16GB of storage space for
a fortnight’s trip. Tablet-based storage could
be an option for these photographers, although
they may require an additional USB thumb drive
to provide back-up security and space for data
overﬂow.
In contrast, serious photographers will
need at least 200GB – and probably more,
particularly if they shoot raw ﬁles and/or
record video clips. A portable hard drive is
currently the only choice for high-volume
shooters, although it needs to be carried
with you throughout your trip. (Make sure it’s
packed in a different carrying case from your
computer.)
You must also balance the need to preserve
the ﬁles you want to edit and print while at
the same time having easily accessible JPEG
versions for sharing. Some cloud-based
storage services (see below) make image
sharing easy as they automatically resize the
copies of shots you send without changing
your originals. Uploading images to a tablet
is another option that can achieve the same
result.
Important image ﬁles can also be copied to
an optical disk, which is easy to post home
while you’re en route. Most photolabs around
the world offer back-up to CD or DVD as a
service.
Even though the storage capacity of disks
is limited, they’re cheap enough to make disk
storage a worthwhile option for photographers
who shoot raw ﬁles and want to preserve their
integrity until they return home.
ISSUES TO CONSIDER
If you’re determined to travel light, the ﬁrst
decision you must make is which ﬁle formats
you’ll shoot – and whether you plan to record
any video clips. Both raw ﬁles and video are
data-hungry and you’re likely to ﬁll an 8GB
memory card in a few hours if you shoot mainly
in either format. In fact, if either raw or video
shooting is your main focus, you might as well
forget about using a tablet and stick with your
laptop.
But, even if you’re a JPEG-only shooter,
before you replace your laptop with a tablet for
travelling, there are a few additional issues to
consider:
1. There’s a limit to the amount of data a
tablet can actually store. At entry level you
get 16GB, rising to 64GB with premium
products. Space ﬁlls quickly when you try
to store JPEGs from your 16-megapixel
(or higher) camera – and even faster if
you shoot movies and/or raw ﬁles. Some
tablets can’t handle raw ﬁle formats and a
some provide no facilities for expanding the
on-board memory.

2. Syncing ﬁles between your regular
computer and a tablet’s ﬁle system can
be difﬁcult. In the case of the iPad, ﬁles
are treated as components of each app’s
workspace and transferring them from one
device to another involves cables, add-on
accessories, iTunes and a lot of toggling.
Bluetooth and WiFi are available in the iPad
3 and also in many Android machines.
Some Android tablets have USB interfaces
and/or SD card slots that provide several
options for memory expansion, including
the ability to connect portable hard drives.
However, transferring ﬁles between devices
can be tricky and is often slow.
3. Moving images off a tablet also requires a
fair bit of bandwidth, particularly when you
have large ﬁles. While travelling you’re often
dependent on the WiFi hotspots in cafes,
at airports and in hotels (although some
provide plug-in internet access). At best,
these places provide a limited service that’s
good enough for sending emails and basic
browsing. But don’t try sending 16GB of
image ﬁles.
4. Bandwidths are smaller and costs are
signiﬁcantly higher if you try transmitting
ﬁles via your telecom’s services, either
as an upload from a 3G tablet or via a
smartphone. And you can easily exceed
your monthly data allowance if you try
uploading a single day’s shots this way.
Given all these obstacles, travelling with a
laptop still has a lot going for it, particularly
if you buy a high-capacity portable hard disk
drive for backing-up your ﬁles. Even a fairly
basic laptop should have at least one USB port
plus enough storage capacity for a couple of
weeks’ shooting. But that doesn’t necessarily
mean you should ignore the cloud storage
option.

CLOUD STORAGE
An attractive solution when travelling is to
store ﬁles ‘in the Cloud’; in other words, online.
Tablets and cloud storage may seem like a
marriage made in heaven, but making that
marriage work isn’t as simple as you think.
There’s an ever-present worry that the
transfer of ﬁles could be interrupted, the
provider’s servers might crash or somebody
may interfere with your data. And even when
things run according to plan, you require a
reliable way to download the ﬁles you’ve stored
when you need them. Getting all these factors
right is a pretty big ask even though much of
the technology infrastructure is available to
make it both possible and efﬁcient.
Fortunately, there’s nothing particularly new
about cloud-based storage. If you have a Gmail,
Yahoo, Hotmail or Windows Live email account
it’s where your emails are stored. The same
is true for photographers who use Google’s
Picasa Web Albums.

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